Despite all the time, talk and money being poured into lifting the number of women in middle and senior management, the data reveals that the needle has barely moved.
New research by Boston Consulting Group, to be released in May, concludes that chief executives and their organisations have “gender fatigue” as a result of focusing their efforts in the wrong places. The report calls for the entire gender balance issue and the way we work to be reimagined.
“There is real fatigue in organisations because there is a mindset that we are reading all the articles and doing everything right, ticking the boxes and introducing all these new initiatives,” BCG partner Anna Green tells BOSS. “But we need much more rigour about what is actually making a difference.”
While vast improvements have been made at graduate and entry levels over the past decade, the gender gap emerges at middle management before widening at the senior level. Only 5 per cent of the CEOs of our top 200 companies are women.
Lion’s share
The case for change remains clear: recent KPMG research shows female CEOs in the top 300 companies delivered a 9 per cent increase in revenue in 2016, compared to the group-wide average of 0.5 per cent, and that companies with women on their boards achieved higher revenue growth, profitability and shareholder returns.
Interviews with CEOs, human resources managers and 700 employees in Australia’s 20 largest companies show companies continue to pour the lion’s share of their diversity efforts into female recruitment, anti-discrimination policies and training to recognise unconscious bias, all of which are rated as ineffective by one-third of all employees.
The BCG report concludes that efforts to better attract and recruit a greater proportion of female candidates is not the problem. Rather, the real blockage occurs further up the talent pipeline. Nearly two-thirds of women see retention and promotion of senior women as the major hurdle at their company.
It’s an issue which receives the least attention and investment. Promotion of women into senior roles still lags well behind men and senior appointments continue to be drawn from existing talent pools of external, mostly male senior executives.
Flexibility key
Overwhelmingly, employees identified flexible work arrangements as the most important prerequisite to fostering gender diversity. Four of the 10 most effective changes companies can make relate to flexibility: the ability to work flexible hours, at different locations, to change hours and work part-time, and childcare.
The uptake of flexible and part-time models among leaders remains low: just 6 per cent of all management roles are configured as part-time. Despite increasingly supportive policies, many employees are reluctant to break the mould for fear of being seen as uncommitted and many teams are not equipped to rethink working models, the report concludes.
Deliberate and highly visible senior role modelling is a critical to overcoming the perception challenge, sending a clear signal that part-time and flexible working models need not compromise career ambition or progression. While ANZ and Telstra have won kudos for announcing all roles flexible, senior executives are yet to lead by example.
Carnival Australia came face-to-face with the problem when implementing a program, which grants employees the option of working a nine-day fortnight. CEO Ann Sherry encouraged others to take advantage of the program but realised it was not until she joined the program that it became widespread.
“If you don’t change the culture which you do from the top then nothing actually changes. Good intentions, good policy, good recruitment, all of that is fine but it doesn’t have a long-lasting change effect unless change comes from the top,” Sherry says.
Role models needed
“If you want people to work flexibly, then you have to demonstrate you are not sitting in the office 12 hours a day, seven days a week, because everyone will match you. And you have to hire that way.
“When I hired a general counsel eight years ago, we looked into the market and biggest single available group was women with children. I said, ‘Let’s advertise it as part-time’ and people said no, but we were completely swamped with amazing applications. I’ve gone after these people who have been spat out of businesses much bigger than mine because of a lack of flexibility. So thank you to them, it’s been an amazing retention tool.”
BCG’s Green, who was promoted to partner after six years of working three to four days a week, says a lesson for their group was hearing from one of their partner’s wives, who is a senior pediatrician at a Sydney hospital.
“She said, ‘You guys think your job is so important and your clients can’t wait to speak to you and you need to be on call 24-7. My clients are very sick and dying children and we know how to work flexibly. We have a handover process and we job share because no doctor can work 24-7.’ To her it was obvious,” Green says.
Men can make or break
The perceptions of men in the workplace is also critical. The report finds fewer men perceive impediments to gender diversity than women. Those men who do observe structural obstacles are most likely to attribute them to recruitment (29 per cent) than to other factors.
Conversely, women perceive obstacles across the board and overwhelmingly with advancement (56 per cent of women versus 21 per cent of men) and retention (46 per cent of women versus 19 per cent of men).
PepsiCo ANZ CEO Robbert Rietbroek says he has worked hard to encourage flexible working among both men and women. “We say, ‘Don’t just be a hero at work but be a hero at home too’, so it is common for our dads to work flexibly to do school drop-offs or pick-ups. But it’s not just for parents. One of our procurement leaders has a deep passion for surfing so he will come in a little later so he can go for a surf.”
Rietbroek has implemented practical tools such as promoting staff during maternity leave, providing staff with mobiles, and implementing their “one simple thing program”, “leaders leave loudly program” and “summer hours” which encourages staff to leave early on Fridays.
“One simple thing is every employee has one thing that really matters to them. For instance my CFO takes his daughter to school every Friday morning. We have another executive who doesn’t take meetings between 4pm and 6pm in the evenings to do school pick-ups.
“We also ask leaders to be vocal when they are leaving to announce to their team, ‘Hey I’m leaving to pick up my daughter,’ that makes it OK for those at lower levels to do it too.”
Rietbroek says despite employers’ fears about letting employees out of the office, productivity and engagement has gone up.
“When you give people trust and trust them to work flexibly and trust them to combine their work and home they tend to make up for it in other hours of the day. There has also been a tremendous rise in overall engagement which has risen by double digits.”
Like Leadership with the Financial Review on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter. Join the LinkedIn conversation.
